Marxism vs. National Socialism: Lenin, Hitler, Mao Compared

Introduction: Revolutionary Promises and Authoritarian Outcomes

Lenin's version of socialism, which became the model for the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, and other underdeveloped nations that underwent revolutions in the twentieth century, was highly centralized, hierarchical, and authoritarian. It emphasized rapid industrialization and economic development under the direction of the Communist Party, although in all these semi-feudal societies this was carried out without the benefits of any type of liberal or democratic traditions. Lenin was a tyrant and mass murderer whose authoritarian — or totalitarian — system became the model for other tyrants like Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. Contrary to the original hopes of Karl Marx and even Lenin, no socialist revolution occurred in Germany, France, or any Western nation, all of which remained dominated by governments hostile to the Soviet Union and Communism in general.

Although Hitler led a National Socialist "revolution" in Germany in 1933, this ideology was hostile to Marxism, Communism, democratic socialism, and liberalism, and was in fact heavily based on racist, anti-Semitic, and Social Darwinist ideas. In 1941, it launched an all-out war of extermination against Russia and Communism, which the Soviet Union barely survived. Hitler's Germanic empire was defeated in 1945, while Britain, France, and the other colonial empires were left bankrupt. In the colonial and semi-colonial world, Communist, socialist, and nationalist movements came to power — often supported by the Soviet Union and opposed by the United States — but these also encountered similar problems in attempting to build socialist societies on very underdeveloped economic and social foundations. All of these revolutions were responsible for millions of deaths; in the cases of the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Mao's China, the toll reached tens of millions. Any "successes" or "strengths" they might have had were far outweighed by the sheer number of deaths they caused, inflicted both on their own people and on others who fell under their control.

Lenin's Soviet Model: Centralization, Terror, and State Socialism

Lenin and his Communist successors in many countries certainly promised the common people peace, land, and bread, but ended up producing poverty, war, and death on a mass scale. In the socialist states founded by Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, poor peasants and the working class were favored in educational and training opportunities, although specialists, officers, and technicians from the old regime were retained temporarily until more trustworthy replacements could be trained. Lenin also insisted on the immediate transition to socialism in Russia as soon as the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, but also argued that "only those enterprises ought to be nationalized which were already run on large-scale capitalist lines" (Service 351). He regarded the authoritarian war economy as the best model for socialism in the Soviet Union and regarded the state as "an engine of coordination and indoctrination" (Service 353). Socialism was first and foremost "account-keeping and supervision" in a centrally planned economy that required high "standards of literacy, numeracy and punctuality" (Service 353).

Lenin and his successors were quite willing to use state terror against class enemies, counter-revolutionaries, or even peasants and petty traders who withheld grain and other supplies from the Communist authorities. Indeed, police-state terror became a common feature in all Marxist states that copied the Soviet model — or had it imposed on them from without. Out of necessity, the Russian Bolsheviks retreated from state socialism temporarily in the New Economic Policy of the 1920s and permitted free trade in grain and small-scale capitalist enterprises, but this was abolished in 1928 when Stalin proclaimed the collectivization of agriculture and the first Five-Year Plan.

Most Western socialists remained liberal and democratic in their ideology, and before 1917 their common assumption had been that socialism actually meant an expansion of political, economic, and industrial democracy. They doubted that Lenin, "the eulogist for dictatorship, was properly categorized as a socialist," as did his Menshevik, social democratic, and Socialist Revolutionary opponents during the civil war of 1918–22 (Service 354). Western liberals and conservatives were eager to identify all forms of socialism with the Leninist-Stalinist police state and the "political, social and economic oppression" of the Soviet Union (Service 358).

Hitler's National Socialism: Racism, War, and Self-Destruction

Hitler's National Socialism was a system without any redeeming features, although it obviously appealed to the majority of Germans who were pleased that the regime ended unemployment and restored Germany's status as a great power. Nazism was a racist and militaristic ideology rather than a form of socialism in the Western sense, and was based on Hitler's own delusions and paranoia, as well as his obsessions about Jews infecting the body of the "healthy" Aryan Volk. Unlike most of the other Communist and nationalist revolutions, it also took place in a highly urbanized and industrialized economy that was second only to the United States in 1933. Hitler's hatred of the Jews and other "non-Aryans" was clearly pathological, and he frequently expressed the desire to kill them all with his own hands. As early as 1922, he was on record stating that he would hang all the Jews in Germany and leave their bodies on public gallows "as long as hygienically possible" (Kershaw 3). In 1929, Hitler had said that 70–80% of German infants should be exterminated every year to "strengthen the bloodline" (Kershaw 11).

He had long planned to exterminate the handicapped, mentally ill, and elderly, and this T-4 euthanasia program began in 1939. Two years later, many of its personnel were transferred to Poland to organize the first death camps for the Jews, and his last will and testament in April 1945 still blamed them for the war and "all the evils of mankind" (Waite 414). Hitler had often threatened to kill himself in difficult or stressful situations, and finally did so on April 30, 1945, when Soviet armies were only a few hundred yards from his bunker. Thus he spared the Allies the trouble of putting him on trial and hanging him at Nuremberg, which was clearly the fate he deserved.

Hitler's decision to go to war with both the Soviet Union and the United States in 1941 was universally regarded by German military and political leaders as irrational, involving Germany in a two-front war it could not possibly win. In his more lucid moments, Hitler himself acknowledged that it had been an illogical and impulsive action, especially when he obliged the United States with a formal declaration of war after Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor (Waite 404). At the time, Franklin Roosevelt was very concerned that he could not obtain a declaration of war against Germany in Congress, which would insist on concentrating the entire war effort in Asia. Hitler relieved him of that worry, even though he had often said in private that the real reason Germany had lost World War I was because the United States finally joined the Allies in 1917. Not even his closest associates understood why he had decided that history had to repeat itself, but Waite argued it was based on his destructive — and self-destructive — impulses rather than rational strategic planning, of which hardly any existed in Nazi Germany (Waite 406). Hitler's war left Germany completely destroyed, with 50–60 million people dead worldwide, and the country divided for the next forty years. Like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, any "successes" or "strengths" he might have had were totally outweighed by the tremendous loss of life that occurred on his orders.

Conclusion: Communism, Capitalism, and the Legacy of Mass Death

In Russia, China, and Cuba, all the socialist and Marxist revolutions took a very different path from the liberal, democratic version of socialism that was the norm in the West. Western countries that were already urbanized and industrialized generally retained a regulated type of capitalism with a welfare state and parliamentary institutions. This system failed in Germany in 1933, but the result was fascism and National Socialism rather than a Marxist or socialist revolution. In the end, Communism only came to power in nations that were in a colonial or semi-feudal condition, where peasants made up a majority of the population and the urban bourgeoisie and working class were weak — or even inconsequential.